MEMOIR 100: Tectonics and Sedimentation: Implications for Petroleum Systems

In the past few decades, the petroleum industry has seen great exploration successes in petroliferous sedimentary basins worldwide; however, the net volume of hydrocarbons discovered each year has been declining since the late 1970s, and the number of new field discoveries per year has dropped since the early 1990s.

We are finding hydrocarbons in more difficult places and in more subtle traps. Although geophysical and engineering technologies are crucial to much of the exploration success, fundamentally, the success is dependent on innovative play concepts associated with spatial and temporal relationships among deformation, deposition, and hydrocarbon accumulation.

Unraveling the dynamic interplay among tectonics, sedimentation, and petroleum systems in the subsurface is a challenge and relies on an integrated approach that combines seismic imaging, well logging, physical and/or computational modeling, as well as outcrop analogs.

In recent decades, an increasing coverage of high-quality three-dimensional (3-D) seismic data along with state-of-the-art 3-D visualization technologies, extensive well tests, sophisticated modeling capabilities, and field (outcrop) analogs, has significantly added to our understanding of subsurface complexities in structure, stratigraphy, and petroleum systems.

The influence of tectonics on sedimentation and hydrocarbon accumulation is different among extensional, strike-slip, and contractional structural styles. Addressing the role of different structural styles and syntectonic sedimentation in petroleum systems is essential to assess the hydrocarbon potential of sedimentary basins.

This 18-chapter volume is small enough to focus on the interplay among tectonics, sedimentation, and petroleum systems. Yet it is big enough to cover the diversity of structural styles in important petroliferous sedimentary basins around the globe, including those in west Africa, east Africa, east Brazil, east United States of America, Gulf of Mexico, South China Sea, the Russian Arctic, and the Mediterranean Sea.

The book begins with reviews, followed by case studies, and ends with an overview chapter. The chapter authors are asked to pitch their papers appropriately. Thus, the tone of the book reads more like a coherent, topical volume than a compiled collection of independent papers.

This volume is intended to provide a snapshot of the advances in petroleum exploration by presenting state-of-the-art reviews and overviews, case studies, and modeling results. The reviews and overviews offer the current status of knowledge in extensional, strike-slip, and contractional tectonic settings, as well as their influence on sedimentation and hydrocarbon accumulation.

The case studies cover diverse geologic settings, with special reference to the most prolific high-profile frontier sedimentary basins, such as those in west Africa, east Africa, east Brazil, Gulf of Mexico, South China Sea, Russian Arctic, and the Mediterranean Sea.

The models provide both numerical and physical simulations of basin structures as well as their spatial variation and temporal evolution in response to different tectonic processes.